Chap. VII. OBLIQUE EYEBROWS. 187 



pressing grief; and yet it is a comparatively rare expres- 

 sion, and often overlooked. I believe the explanation is 

 not so difficult as it at first appears. Dr. Duchenne 

 gives a photograph of the young man before referred to, 

 who, when looking upwards at a strongly illuminated 

 surface, involuntarily contracted his grief-muscles in an 

 exaggerated manner. I had entirely forgotten this 

 photograph, when on a very bright day with the sun 

 behind me, I met, whilst on horseback, a girl whose eye- 

 brows, as she looked up at me, became extremely oblique, 

 with the proper furrows on her forehead. I have ob- 

 served the same movement under similar circumstances 

 on several subsequent occasions. On my return home 

 I made three of my children, without giving them any 

 clue to my object, look as long and as attentively as they 

 could, at the summit of a tall tree standing against an 

 extremely bright sky. With all three, the orbicular, 

 corrugator, and pyramidal muscles were energetically 

 contracted, through reflex action, from the excitement 

 of the retina, so that their eyes might be protected from 

 the bright light. But they tried their utmost to look 

 upwards; and now a curious struggle, with spasmodic 

 twitchings, could be observed between the whole or only 

 the central portion of the frontal muscle, and the sev- 

 eral muscles which serve to lower the evebrows and close 

 the eyelids. The involuntary contraction of the pyram- 

 idal caused the basal part of their noses to be trans- 

 versely and deeply wrinkled. In one of the three chil- 

 dren, the whole evebrows were momentarily raised and 

 lowered by the alternate contraction of the whole frontal 

 muscle and of the muscles surrounding the eyes, so that 

 the whole breadth of the forehead was alternately wrin- 

 kled and smoothed. In the other two children the fore- 

 head became wrinkled in the middle part alone, rectan- 

 gular furrows being thus produced; and the eyebrows 



